The Madness of Love
Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
January 29, 2023
In 1963, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist have a summer job herding sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. They fall in love but pursuing a same sex relationship is dangerous, so both men leave that summer and marry women. Over the course of the next 25 years, these men struggle with their tremendous passion for each other grounded in an intense, lasting love but tempered by the reality of the time and location of their lives. Not being willing or able to risk the loss of family or safety, they settle on loveless marriages and periodic fishing trips on Brokeback Mountain where they can be alone. It’s during those trips they are each most alive and most authentically themselves. The months and years between are empty, often lifeless periods of waiting for the next time they can be together. Ultimately, Jack is killed although Ennis never really knows what happened and is left to live his life profoundly alone. In the final scene of the movie, Ennis is in a room holding two t-shirts covered in his and his lover’s blood.
On this bleak mid-winter afternoon, I’m hoping to bring a little warmth, maybe some joy, hopefully a brief respite, by talking about love and desire. We’re taking a break from our usually scheduled Love As Justice, and instead, we’re talking about romance.
Romantic love is one of humanities primary relationships. I talk often from the pulpit about the power of love in changing the world, the necessity of love as a tool for social justice, and I’m sure I’ve nearly worn out the word love, speaking it so many times it’s gotten thin, smudged, faded and so soft it might disintegrate. But today I’m talking about romance, about falling in love and living in love and being so defined by love we can no longer even tell it’s there.
Love is all- encompassing, life-altering, world-changing, mind-blowing, family-creating… and family-destroying. It might be the most powerful experience a human can have. The loss of love or the loss of a loved one is equally explosive and life-defining.
The Madness of Love. Or, in the case of Jack and Ennis, the Madness of a Society that Blocks Love. But, that’s so often the case. Regulating love and sex is as ancient as civilization. But desire cannot be regulated.
Romeo was a Montague. Juliet, a Capulet. Their families were sworn enemies, but they met at a ball and fell madly in love. After the party, in what is now famously called the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of his family. Romeo makes himself known to her and they agree to be married, a promise that comes to pass the next day. After their secret wedding and one night together, Juliet’s father agrees to offer her hand in marriage to a suitor named Paris. In an attempt to get away from her fate, Juliet drinks a potion that will make her appear dead. Romeo, thinking his lover is gone, kills himself. When she awakens, Juliet sees her husband dead and follows him to her death.
That story always strikes me as being both an epic love story and a little bit ridiculous. They met, married and died for each other in the course of 3 days. Of course, they were teenagers, so it might not be completely unrealistic.
Regardless of the timeline, this is a classic love story, an ancient story rewritten and timelessly memorialized by Shakespeare and reimagined over and over again for each new contemporary context. We can’t stop telling the story, hearing the story, because love captivates us, because we have all known love – or wished to know love – so powerful we weren’t willing to live without it. It becomes the life of every cell in our bodies, the breath we need to continue minute to minute.
The experience of falling in love doesn’t last a lifetime, but it can set the stage for a lifetime. Real lives are filled with the mundane, with doing dishes and running errands and answering phones and feeding children and going to meetings and living on a budget. Doing those things as you build and sustain a life with someone you love alters the nature of daily life.
We often speak of "falling in love," as if love is stumbled into or we talk of "being in love" as if love is a permanent condition. Both phrases imply that nothing is easier or more natural than love. Yet there’s hardly any human enterprise which begins with such hope and expectation and fails so regularly. Love takes time, effort, even training. It’s not for beginners, a fact Romeo and Juliet found out the hard way.
When we talk about finding a mate, we often talk about becoming desired. Stand in front of any collection of popular magazines and it’s all quite apparent. The problem most people think they have is not loving better, but becoming more lovable. For men, that often translates to money and power. For women, all too often, we focus on physical beauty. Second to those things for all genders is the ability to maintain interesting conversations, to be funny, and to be well mannered. Being lovable becomes a mixture of being popular and having sex appeal as any high school sophomore can tell you.
It’s as if there’s nothing to be learned about love, that the problem is one of the object, not the faculty. In other words, we think loving is easy, the difficulty is finding the right person to love- the object of my affection. The difficulty is being attractive enough to someone I desire. Love becomes an extension of our consumer culture. We spend our courtship years- which happen between the ages of 10 and 100 – window shopping. We marry when we have found the best item on the market, given our own spending limitations.
But real love requires much more than making the right purchase, more than being desired by one you desire. That might make for a really fun weekend, but then you’re done. Love is what happens after, what happens when the falling is over and you’ve landed in a home with a partner. It’s good to remember that real love isn’t a feeling. Feelings come and go. Scott Peck taught us so long ago- Love is a Decision. Love is a difficult and lasting decision, a decision to be present and honest and fully yourself while encouraging growth and offering support for an other. And while that decision can be changed, that it’s been made creates a container for the rest of our lives. We can feel angry, but that anger is held in the framework of love. We can feel disappointed, or bored, but the decision to love still encircles us. It’s why we can disagree, and decide to talk about it later. We know we’re together, that most things aren’t urgent, that the container we’ve wrapped ourselves in will hold.
Authentic love is also, by its very nature, self-generating. It multiplies, it expands. It rehearses it's abundance in generosity. Many years ago I was presiding at a wedding for two people entering their second marriage. They had a mature love, one that drew people in and sent them back out with a great experience of joy. I had told them not to pay me for the wedding, so instead, they pulled up to my new house with a car filled with flowers to be planted in my empty garden. When they opened the back of the car, I gasped. There was so much color and life filling this car. It seemed like a perfect reflection of their relationship- filled with a love that multiplies generously.
Real love extends beyond ourselves and into the world. It’s not about desiring one other person, but about loving one person so much it spills onto the streets. One of my favorite moments in the Romeo and Juliet tale is when Romeo refuses to fight. Romeo is confronted by one of Juliet’s kinsmen and challenges him to a duel. But Romeo sees his former enemies as his future family and can’t bring himself to participate. Love has expanded to include even this man he hardly knows. True love is inclusive, opening the lovers to union with all of life. Love awakens us to existence outside ourselves. We can suddenly see the other no longer as enemy but as family.
Living with someone for a long time, growing older with someone, living in the averageness of daily life doesn’t preclude the need for passion. This is why I loved our opening reading. It’s a regular moment. She’s in a café with her husband. Something they’ve done a thousand times together. But a young woman leans over and asks about his dessert and the author yearns for a life in that moment in which people are reaching for so much more than what’s in front of them, where people are accepting their own lust and giving in to it if only just a little bit. She enjoys that her husband feels something, wants something. He’s still alive. And so is she.
She can only get to that place because they’ve been together a long time, because she trusts her husband and isn’t living in constant insecurity. She’s learned something about love. She’s learned how to find and offer room within the container of marriage. She’s learned not to be afraid of hungers, not to be afraid to want something or to allow her husband to desire something more. It’s how we grow, how we stay alive. We accept and love the life we are living and we reach for more. Within the container of joy and commitment with a partner, we stay alive by reaching for more.
Falling in love, agreeing to share your life with someone is a risk. You could get your heart broken. It happens all the time, which, if it’s ever happened to you, is difficult to believe. How can people function once that’s happened? How do you get up in the morning, get kids off to school, go to work, have conversations, how do you gather the energy just to take a shower once your beloved has cheated on you, left you for someone else, told you you are no longer loved? How do you move forward when your lover has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or died in a car accident? How can you continue when your heart has been broken? Maybe it’s better not to take the risk, better to let love move by you, remain unnoticed, safe, alone. Love is so likely to end badly, it might be best to stay away. And yet, even with millions of books and movies and songs going back through the ages, warning us, it’s a risk most of us take at some time. We want more from life than what we have, we want to live bolder and sing louder and feel stronger than we do. We want the feeling of falling and of standing and living in love, of creating a life with someone.
UU Minister Rev. Bob Janis wrote a poem I’ve been loving. It’s called “The Hunter”.
Love, the Hunter
Love roams the earth
Looking for victims
Sacrifices to the high God
She is not inescapable
Some days we are too fast
too wary
Once I was able to disguise myself
as a man looking at a train timetable
She went right on by
until I started looking at the numbers too closely
and I enjoyed the way the four looked next to the eight
And I was flattened
If love catches you
then that's it for you
I'm afraid
O you may find a moment or two out of her clutches
A time to reminisce about when the days were your own
and you were the one
trying to capture the world
and bring it home
But in the end
there is only one pit
and we all fall in
And though it's not the fire that consumes us
everything that brought us to this point
down to our very flesh
will be destroyed
But at that point you won't care much
For you will become a part of love itself
Maybe love is after all more of a gatherer.
Ultimately, we want to be caught, want to burn in a fire, be destroyed in a pit, melt into love. We might even want to love so ferociously we’re willing to die or even kill to protect it. Like Ennis and Jack, we’re willing to risk everything we have because when love is real, nothing is more powerful or beautiful or more necessary. We are not here to live numb, cold lives, to play it safe. No one gets out alive. We’re here to live boldly, to risk mightily. We’re here to love what our bodies love, to be with the people we can’t live without, to climb balconies in the middle of the night and profess love unto death. This is what it means to be a people of desire. This is the joy and the madness of love.
